[MUSIC] After we have covered the definitions of GIS and the basics self cyber. Let's start learning CyberGIS. CyberGIS, in a nutshell, is quite intuitive. Essentially is integration of Cyber and GIS, but it's more than individually the two parts adding up together. The definition of CyberGIS is geospatial information, science and systems based on advanced computing and cyberinfrastructure. What it means broadly speaking, from this Wikipedia entry is CyberGIS represents data intensive and the computational approaches to geospatial problem solving in a variety of domains. A little bit about CyberGIS history. And this is a presentation I gave in 2003. So that's more than 16 years ago. And at that time, online environment that accesses cyberinfrastructure resources for a few examples of solving geospatial problems. In this case was special clustering analysis using advanced computing resources but access, infrastructure fashion. It's not necessarily, for instance, this analysis is conducted on my personal computer or even on the Web server of this environment. But rather the analysis was conducted on a remote computer access through sophisticated middleware and then presented to the server and then visualized in online environment through Web browser. So this was done 2003 and a couple of years later, this environment has then become more sophisticated. And this includes more nuanced control of optimizing the access of advanced cyberinfrastructure resources as was more sophisticated analysis you could conduct through this web environment. And remember, this was even before Google Map and the Earth was existing. And fast forward about 2010, this paper was published essentially outlines the key principles and the building blocks is of CyberGIS. Basically, you look at this picture. CyberGIS represents this elements on the outside, including high performance computing, big data to knowledge transformation, visualization and the visual analytics and collaborative problem solving. So if you think about all these four components on the outside, you might relate to then 2010. Even today, Mainstream GIS, for instance, based on your personal computers, and all of these components are largely not well covered by conventional GIS. And this is essentially the departure CyberGIS represents from the mainstream GIS a few decades ago that covers the integration of these four parts. Then pushing toward the middle with multiple tears, which I call as an onion model. Because these four parts and the integration among them represents new research and education frontiers, for instance, including component based architecture and what the competition intensity means in solving geospatial problems and how to resolve competition intensity is another frontier of research. And of course, how do you exploit massive parallelism when you're dealing with geospatial big data? That's another research frontier. So in this diagram, you saw notations of this different new scientific research frontiers posed by this new framework of CyberGIS, which we did not necessarily consider from conventional GIS point of view. And a more recently, only a couple of years ago, new book on CyberGIS was published. That includes, more comprehensively the field and what the field is standing in terms of the scope of CyberGIS research and education and the related applications. As we learned from the definition of GIS as a system, computer based system and obviously CyberGIS is also computer based system. The difference here is the CyberGIS is living in cyber environments and there are a couple examples here on this slide providing the cyber environment, which is very different from your personal computers. One is a virtual roger. As we briefly covered in our topic of advanced cyberinfrastructure. The other one is on the right side of the bottom of the slide is called Exceed, which is the national cyberinfrastructure framework supported by the National Science Foundation here in the US. Would exceed standard forces extreme science and engineering discovery environment that includes about twenty high performance computing and the data resources interconnected through fast network across the country in the US. And all these resources are provisions to scientists like myself through easy to access services. So I would not have to be concerned so much about how to get into each of those twenty some resources across the country. I focus on the services and capabilities unified across these resources and provisions. To me, as a service is truly a notion of advanced cyberinfrastructure provisioning such capabilities as the services. Now CyberGIS is essentially living in such cyber environments but also representing new software capabilities, which we will learn in this course. I'll highlight the three key modalities of CyberGIS software. One is called the CyberGIS Gateway, meaning CyberGIS could be used and accessed by non CyberGIS experts in a friendly fashion, oftentimes through your browser's and online environments. The second modality of CyberGIS access is, CyberGIS Toolkit essentially inclusive of a number of open source algorithms and codes that are optimized on the cyber environment. Remember, traditionally conventional GIS is largely based on sequential computing using your personal computers, for example. Now, if we consider CyberGIS needs to harness the massive computing power and the big data resources, we need a new set of algorithms that are able to do so. So CyberGIS Toolkit, it essentially represents such an effort as a collection of open source software modules and algorithms that are natively living in the CyberGIS environments and are able to harness the power of massive computing from advancing cyberinfrastructure and the big data resources available. Advanced cyberinfrastructure. The third modality of CyberGIS software's is GISolve Middleware that essentially is to facilitate access to advanced cyberinfrastructure resources on behalf of CyberGIS users and applications. To access advanced cyberinfrastructure resources oftentimes, because of the complexity of such resources require a broker that hides the complexity of such access. And at the same time, provides friendly interfaces such as application program interfaces to application developers so that CyberGIS application developers would know as much as GIS application development would be able to develop powerful applications, would not have to know much about sophisticated cyberinfrastructure. So that's what the Middleware does. So this is three modalities of CyberGIS software. Work together, provide a major capability for geospatial discovery and innovation, and for enabling a variety of applications. And in fact, such CyberGIS software has been used by our large community across the globe. This is a map, a bit outdated from a publication in 2016, and at that time we mapped out the users and contributors of CyberGIS software, and you can see, in fact, the communities spreading out across the globe. The major users, of course, is in the US, but you see from Europe and even Africa and Australia and South America and China and Russia there as well. Now let's review the signs of CyberGIS in contrast to GIS as a science branch. CyberGIS is different from conventional GIS. The scientific point of view for instance, now we see CyberGIS is living in cyber environments how to access CyberGIS that is built on cyberinfrastructure. Accessing high performance computers. Massive cyber resources is very different from accessing your mobile devices and your personal computers. So that is a research frontier. And the CyberGIS also represents a frontier of integrating the science of geospatial data and the science of complex systems and the science of information and the science of computation. So CyberGIS is encompassing all of these different kinds of scientific research to achieve this unprecedented capability, situated between a variety of geospatial applications and advanced cyberinfrastructure. Now, if you want to achieve this integration, you would need to consider interoperability because there are large number of different parts either focused on data, computation, collaboration, visualization, and we need the different parts to talk to each other to inter operate with each other. We need standards for putting them together to work as a concerted holistic environment such as a CyberGIS software is delivering for either applications or users. Now, if you work on such integrated system reliability, oftentimes is a challenge because some parts could not be working as you would expect or some parts could fail. Now, reproducibility is yet another challenge because if you have a problem solved using CyberGIS, that means you need to engage different parts to solve your problems and to have the similar or same conditions from those parts to make sure your solutions are consistent is not affected by when you access those different parts. And scalability, as we're talking about CyberGIS is living in cyber environments that is including so many different parts and so powerful computing resources on big data resources. And we need to figure out how to effectively harness such power of computing and the big data resources. And the scalability part is both exciting and challenging because this is essentially going out of the box of traditional GIS is going to this massively scalable environment of computing resources on big data to figure out a new innovation opportunities. So we have two kinds of CyberGIS communities. One is focused on the science and technology of CyberGIS. The other is focused on the usage of CyberGIS. And you can see from this slide, these two kinds of communities, they're related, but they do represent their own interests. And CyberGIS for instance, at the University of Illinois, we have a campus wide interdisciplinary center. As I mentioned earlier, it's called a CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Special Studies, including some really unique resources such as Virtual Roger, which is a geospatial supercomputer. We will use in our class as you're learning more advanced work through this course, and you could go online to visit the CyberGIS Center to see different activities of the Centre. There are also other similar initiatives in the US and in other countries and pushing the frontiers of the CyberGIS research and education. This part covers the motivation of the development of CyberGIS as well as the history of CyberGIS. The major framework of CyberGIS innovation, CyberGIS software and the CyberGIS computing resources as well as the communities of CyberGIS, including example of university research program. This is a comprehensive review of the field of CyberGIS. Now we are getting well prepared to go to our next topics that is related to CyberGIS but more focused on data science.
